SUNY campuses should cooperate

The chance that there will ever be fewer than 64 State University of New York campuses is slim. But fear of eroding campus identity is deeply rooted. That puts a big hurdle in the way of a new SUNY effort to get campuses to save money by sharing back-office costs. Still, shared services is a worthy approach, and SUNY should keep working at it.

The germ of the idea is the decline in state funding for SUNY. Chancellor Nancy Zimpher wants campuses to spend less on administration and more on teaching and student services. That's a good plan for not letting a funding crisis go to waste.

But the politics are tricky. State legislators, campus presidents and officials in towns around SUNY schools would fiercely resist any proposal to cut spending by closing a campus. Though it has been mentioned in the past, nobody's proposing closures right now. Still, any move to make campuses break out of their silos and cooperate with others inevitably stirs this primal fear.

So Zimpher avoids using the word consolidation, so as not to evoke another dreaded word, closing. Instead, she's creating "Campus Alliance Networks," regional clusters of schools that are supposed to work together to find the services they can best share.

Unsurprisingly, some campuses wonder why they've been put in a group with X-campus, instead of Y-campus. So Zimpher will have to be flexible on the shape of these alliances. But on the broad idea of saving through shared services, she should stick to it and get it done.